


Dark Things

by bethagain



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Case Fic, Gen, Not Slash, a bit horror maybe, a bit science fiction, but I hope it makes you laugh a few times too, but I'm ok if you want to wear your preslash goggles, gen - Freeform, inspiration from Lovecraft, inspiration from Stephen King
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-10
Updated: 2013-12-10
Packaged: 2018-01-04 05:10:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 16,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1076908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bethagain/pseuds/bethagain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The answer should be obvious.  It's almost always obvious.  But these murders...  They don't make sense.</p>
<p>My first fanfic!  (Didn’t even mean to do it, but Sherlock showed up in another story and wouldn’t go away.  I finally just gave in.  Wouldn’t you?)  Comments and concrit very much welcomed.</p>
<p>Update:  Noticed some slow spots... did a light edit to make it go faster!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into English available: [Mroczne Sprawy- TŁUMACZENIE](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4079566) by [Toootie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toootie/pseuds/Toootie)



> This started as a NaNoWriMo project. It was going to be a horror story, and then a supernatural mystery story, but my main character kept talking in Sherlock’s voice. I finally gave in and let him take over. He wanted John there, too, of course, and then Lestrade and the rest of the gang showed up, and, well, I just did my best to keep up and get it all written down.
> 
> Inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, and of course ACD and the whole BBC Sherlock team.
> 
> Story has been edited and proofed but not britpicked. I lived in London for a short while but it was ages ago, so most of the locations are courtesy Google. I apologize for any goofs on places, customs, or British vs. American English. I also apologize for butchering police procedure, which I’m sure I have done. (If I say it’s “alternate universe," can I get away with it?) All comments are welcome, and in fact I would be thrilled to hear what you think!
> 
> Oh--one warning--the crime scenes are a bit gruesome (first paragraph sets the tone). Most of the violence happens off-camera, but if the first paragraph's upsetting to you, you might want to skip this one.

The corpse had no head. The neck was a jagged ring of flesh. Backbone rose white from the center. The trachea gaped.

Sherlock Holmes stood in the middle of the room, facing what was left of the body. His eyes took in bare concrete walls, the chipped grey paint on the concrete floor, hooks hanging on tracks where sides of beef had once swung. The tracks seemed to recede into the distance, an optical illusion that made the room look bigger than it could possibly be.

Detective Inspector Lestrade was outside, having been banished along with the rest of the homicide team. John Watson waited in a corner, watching for that moment when Sherlock’s eyes would open wide, his mouth would form that “O” of surprise, and the mystery would be solved.

It didn’t happen.

Sherlock’s eyes seemed to lose focus, as if he didn’t even see the crime scene anymore. For a moment, John wasn’t sure he was still breathing. 

And then Sherlock turned and, without a word, walked out.

 

John spent a moment shaking his head and wondering why he put up with this. Then he left the building himself, joining Lestrade on the sidewalk. The DI was watching Sherlock walk away, and clearly wondering the same thing.

“So…” Lestrade said, not sounding very hopeful. “Has he got it?”

“I don’t think so,” John replied. “If he has, he’s being a mysterious git about it again.”

Sergeant Sally Donovan looked over from where she’d been chatting with a cop in uniform. “As if that even needs to be said?”

“Yeah, I know. But I really don’t think he does this time. He looked… mad.”

Donovan gave an unladylike snort. “As if that needed to be said either?”

John had to laugh. “You know what I mean.”

Lestrade was still staring off after Sherlock, and looking a bit lost. After a moment he ran a hand through his short, graying hair and snapped back to Detective Inspector mode. He turned to his team. “OK everyone. Work’s done here. Let’s pack it in, get back to the station, and see what the evidence guys can tell us. Anderson, you got what you need?”

“I had it twenty minutes ago,” the forensics expert said, his tone prim. “We could have skipped the part with the psychopath in the coat.”

“All right, Anderson,” Lestrade replied mildly. “Let’s go.”

 

Back at 211B Baker Street, John found the flat quiet and dark. He rummaged in the fridge for something to have for tea, pushing aside a plastic container of—were those hooves?—and deciding not to look in the paper bag that had appeared since yesterday. He found boxes from the Chinese place down the street and had to think for a moment. How old were those? They’d been half finished with a takeaway a few nights ago when Sherlock’s phone had rung, and John had stashed everything hurriedly in the refrigerator before dashing after him. 

That had ended in a black eye for John and stitches for Sherlock, but it had been fun dashing about the Victoria and Albert Museum at night, chasing down a master art thief, footsteps echoing in the empty halls. And he’d got to see the new exhibit of 1920s fashion before anyone else. So that was good.

After that… he’d filled in for three nights at the Accident and Emergency Department over at University College Hospital. Convenient to Baker Street, and he could have a stroll through Regent’s Park on the way. And lord knew they needed the cash, when Sherlock couldn’t be bothered to bill for his services half the time. 

And then there’d been a day at home, Sherlock messing around with a chunk of sodium at the kitchen table, not bored _yet_ , and John half reading and half listening out for the inevitable explosion.

So that was, what, 5 days ago at least. How long did fried rice keep in the refrigerator? John cast back in his memory for the medical school lecture that covered food poisoning, considered getting out his toxicology book, and finally shrugged, dumped the leftovers into a bowl, and popped them in the microwave. Which was, thankfully, empty of any human remains at the moment.

By the time Sherlock returned, the sun had long since set and fog was making the streetlights into orange globes. Only a few people hurried along Baker Street, collars turned up against the chill. John watched one couple scurry across the road, his arm around her, their footsteps matching. 

At which point he realized that he was staring out the window at half-past 9 at night, waiting for his flatmate. God, how long had it been since he’d had a date? 

He was going back through his memory—was there anyone he could ring up _now?_ —when the familiar tall figure appeared at the end of the block. Sherlock was walking slowly, head up, not looking left or right. John watched two pedestrians dodge away at the last minute to avoid a collision. 

Footfalls came slowly up the seventeen steps—Sherlock had been astounded to learn that John had never counted—and paused a moment before the doorknob turned. But the man revealed when the door opened wasn’t moving slowly or looking thoughtful at all. Sherlock stepped smartly into the flat, turned crisply, hung up his coat with a flourish, and strode into the kitchen.

“What’ve we got in for tea?”

“It’s almost ten o’clock at night, Sherlock,” John pointed out. “‘Tea’ was ages ago.”

“Don’t be pedantic, John.” Sherlock peered around the kitchen. “I see you decided not to worry about _Bacillus cereus_ in the fried rice.”

“Nope.” As usual, John took the apparent mind-reading trick in stride. “Decided if I got food poisoning, I could count on you to take care of me.”

The look on Sherlock’s face wasn’t quite a sneer, but it came close. “The rice had been in the refrigerator since Thursday. You put it there immediately after we finished eating, because you are like that. We keep our refrigerator at 2 degrees Celsius. _Bacillus cereus_ doesn’t grow at 2 degrees.” He thought for a moment. “Gilbert and Stringer, I believe. _Journal of Hygiene_ , 1974. You could have looked it up.”

“Or I could have waited for my walking encyclopedia to come home. I didn’t leave you any, by the way.”

“So I see.” 

Sherlock reached up to the cupboard for a box of Corn Flakes, dumped some in a bowl, and splashed milk over the top. John watched him.

“Challenging case today, wasn’t it?” he asked, as Sherlock leaned on the counter, spooning up Corn Flakes.

Sherlock swallowed carefully before he spoke. “Was it?”

“Wasn’t it? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you walk off a crime scene like that.”

Sherlock waved the hand with the spoon airily. “It was dull.”

“So you’ve solved it then?”

Sherlock ate Corn Flakes.

“You going to tell Lestrade?”

Sherlock ate Corn Flakes.

“You going to tell _me?_ ”

The bowl hit the counter with a crash. Milk flew across the kitchen, splashing the microscope and the slides scattered over the kitchen table. Sherlock didn’t even look, and he certainly didn’t make a move to clean it up. He stalked off to his bedroom, slamming the door behind him.

“Well, all right then,” sighed John. Getting up from the windowsill, he sank down in his favorite armchair, picking up the latest Ian Rankin novel along the way.


	2. Chapter 2

The next morning found them at another crime scene. It was painfully early, a good two hours before sunrise. Sherlock was walking around with his usual manic energy, although John knew for a fact he hadn’t bothered to shower and had almost walked into the door on his way out of the flat. His hair was a bit on end, too. And there was yet another reason for the dramatic long coat, John supposed: it hid the fact that Sherlock had tugged on yesterday’s shirt, which was desperately in need of ironing. Or maybe, John thought, vaguely recalling a violin concerto at 3am, the man hadn’t ever gotten undressed at all.

The room they were in had another concrete floor, also adorned with chipped paint. But this was a cozy garden shed, the floor a vibrant shade of green, the walls hung with spades and digging forks, little square plastic starter pots stacked up neatly on a clean wooden table. The windows were opaque with dust caked on by weather, but they were large, with lovely leaded glass panes. It must have been a cheerful place to work when the sun was shining in.

Sherlock didn’t look cheerful at all. He was moving in bursts around the room, looking at everything but the corpse that lay in the center of the floor. One leg and the opposite arm were still attached to the torso, which was clad in a torn flannel smock and denim shreds that had once been blue jeans. The left leg, the right arm, and the head were missing. 

Sherlock’s tall figure cast sharp shadows on the walls. The arc lights turned the angles of his face into white and black planes. 

He touched the rake and shovel leaning against the wall, ran a gloved finger across the pegboard, got down to the level of the worktable and peered across the clean-swept top. 

John looked at the body while Sherlock looked at everything else. The torso had soft-looking breasts below the bloody cloth of the smock, a curve to the hip on the side where the leg remained. Smooth skin—where it wasn’t scratched and gouged—suggested she was young. The remaining hand was encased in a garden glove. Another glove lay crumpled nearby. Thin, scabbed-over scratches on the wrist, above the glove and below the rolled-up sleeve, said cat. Black and brown hairs, long and short, in the caked blood on her jeans said two. 

Lestrade had told them that she worked at the Bakehouse Café, just a few blocks away. Her boss had gotten worried when she didn’t come in to start the day’s bread. No one else had reported her missing. From the smell that was beginning to rise from the body, she’d been dead for many hours, perhaps a day. So, John thought—he was starting to get the hang of this!—probably no boyfriend or girlfriend. Probably lived alone. 

The shed was behind a row house and it was oddly crammed into a corner, a small outbuilding in a stingy yard. It seemed roomy enough inside, though. John admired the interior, which must have been carefully arranged to take advantage of the space. 

Outside the window, portable lights illuminated tall, scraggly grass. The lawn was the size of a postage stamp, but it hadn’t been mowed in ages. Ok, so… what did _that_ mean? 

Lestrade stuck his head in through the doorway. “Sherlock? You ready to tell me what you’ve got?”

John looked back from the window and saw that Sherlock had stopped his restless examination of the room. He was standing in front of the worktable, apparently trying to stare a hole in the opposite wall. 

“Sherlock?” Lestrade said again.

Sherlock moved his head as if to shake off a gnat. “I can tell you eighteen different things about her,” he said briskly. “Maybe nineteen if I’m right about the tomato allergy. Which one would you like first?”

“I can find out about her from her friends and family, Sherlock,” Lestrade sighed. “I’d like to know what happened here.”

“She was murdered,” Sherlock told him.

John could see Lestrade marshalling his temper. “What we want to know,” he said, visibly forcing himself to keep his tone civilized, “is by who. And how.”

“Whom,” Sherlock corrected absently. But he did move over to the body, crouching down just far enough away to avoid getting blood on his shoes. He lifted the left hand, peered at the gardening glove, then slipped it off and examined hand, fingers, nails. He studied the sole of the shoe and the torn flesh where the left leg had been. He pulled out a magnifying glass and squinted at some flecks of paint that must have come up from the floor, bits of grey against the green.

Then he opened the smock, spread it wide, and stood staring down at the body’s bare, bruised torso, while the forensics team peering through the doorway looked uncomfortable.

“That’s really not appropri—“ Sergeant Donovan began, but Lestrade shushed her.

“Just let him do his thing, Sally. We’ll put her back together afterward.”

“It’s still not right,” Donovan grumbled, but more quietly now. “You know he gets off on this.”

It was true, John thought, watching Sherlock as he stared intently at the corpse. But not the way Donovan thought. In fact, he’d never known Sherlock to “get off” that way about anything. He’d never seen the man show the remotest interest in sex, unless it was an observation on the absurdities of his fellow humans. 

But a good crime scene? A clever murder? A theft from behind a locked and bolted door? Now those were the things that brought out the gleam in Sherlock’s eyes, that actually made him clap his hands with glee. That brought the grin that you hardly ever saw when life was being ordinary.

So why weren’t they getting that smile this morning? It was a suitably gruesome crime scene. Sherlock had seemed to enjoy the taxi ride over, commenting non-stop on the homeless who were just packing up their sleeping rolls, and on the workers beginning to make their way to the Tube. He’d diagnosed six drug habits—half among the homeless, half among the business suits. He’d deduced the existence of three affairs. He’d even turned down the donuts one of the uniforms was offering: “I don’t eat when I’m working.”

So what was wrong here? Minutes had gone by while John was ruminating, and Sherlock was still standing in the same spot, staring at the half-naked body. 

No, not staring. His eyes had that blank look again. Like his mind had gotten stuck.

“Oi,” said John gently, stepping up behind him.

Sherlock jumped. 

Yes, thought John, definitely something wrong here. “You want to take a break?”

Sherlock didn’t turn around. “It’s not right, John,” he said softly.

“We could have told you that,” came Donovan’s voice from the doorway. “Stripping that poor woman bare—” Her voice faded as Lestrade yanked her back outside. 

Sherlock continued as if there hadn’t been an interruption. “There’s blood, but not enough blood. Look, John.” He pointed to the wall to the right of the worktable, where a splatter of red marked the pegboard and splashed across the hanging tools. The wall behind them showed a similar splatter, and there was a thin spray of blood on the floor. But, John realized, how could the worktable and the windows look so pristine?

“She was killed here, but she couldn’t have been killed here.” Sherlock fell silent for another moment. “It doesn’t make any _sense_.”

“Sherlock?” Lestrade was back in the doorway, looking worried in his crumpled blue Tyvek coveralls. “You ok?”

Sherlock didn’t look around. His voice was flat. “I have absolutely no idea what happened here.”

“All right,” said Lestrade. “It was worth a try. Can’t be on your game all the time.”

Sherlock’s spine stiffened. He stripped the nitrile gloves off, headed for the door, brushed past Lestrade without a word. He turned back just for a moment on his way to the road. “Call me if you find the rest of her.”


	3. Chapter 3

It was hours before John got the chance to ask Sherlock what was going on. He left straight from the crime scene for a shift at a general practice clinic all the way over in East Barnet. It was a day of runny noses, broken up by one interesting rash and one chest pain patient who actually did need to go to A&E. He made the mistake of taking the bus home because he thought it would be interesting, and spent two and a half hours on the top level of a double-decker, wondering how he’d forgotten about rush hour traffic. 

When he finally got to Baker Street, there was a young man in jeans and a hoodie standing on the doorstep, pressing on the buzzer.

Sherlock would have known in an instant if this was a client, a kid selling magazine subscriptions, or Mrs. Hudson’s long-lost nephew. Or maybe a disgruntled criminal with a gun in his waistband, there to kill them all.

“Can I help you?” John asked, politely.

The kid looked over at him. “Do you live here?”

John nodded, putting on a friendly smile. “Did you need something?”

“Oh,” said the kid, looking disappointed. “I thought this was where you find that detective bloke. That Sherlock Holmes.”

Ah, of course. It wasn’t like John’s picture didn’t appear beside Sherlock’s in half the newspaper articles and every couple of weeks on TV. It seemed he became invisible in Sherlock’s shadow. He supposed everyone did. Sherlock had a way of sucking up all the attention in a room. “C’mon,” said John, unlocking the door. “I’ll introduce you.”

Up the seventeen steps, the kid’s footsteps shuffling a bit like he wasn’t sure he was ready to do this after all. The door to the flat was wide open, the sitting room in its usual state of chaos. Sherlock was stretched out on the floor beside the coffee table, staring at the ceiling, his violin resting on his chest. 

He looked round as John reached the top of the stairs, looking past him and taking in their visitor. “Oh,” he said slowly. “Is that what that was?”

John turned back to the kid. “How many times did you ring the doorbell?”

The kid looked uncomfortable. “Two or three.”

“Six,” said Sherlock. “Although that last should count for more than one. Twenty-four seconds, was it? Honestly, anyone with half a brain would have realized after the second try that there wasn’t anyone at home.”

“Just come in and sit down,” John told the kid in his best reassuring voice. Had to be a client, didn’t he? He didn’t look like much, but you never knew. Maybe the scruffy clothes and bad haircut were hiding a posh background and a pile of old money.

“Wishful thinking, John,” Sherlock sighed from the floor. But he did get up, brush a couple of dust bunnies from his absurdly well-made dressing gown, and drop into a chair across from their visitor. He gestured languidly at the young man. “Proceed.”

The kid gaped at him. “Go ahead,” John encouraged. “He might look like the undead, but he doesn’t actually bite.”

“Usually,” added Sherlock.

“It—It’s my mate, sir,” the kid stammered out. “There was just his shoes. Just his shoes, you know? Before he were there, and then I went out to get some fags, and when I got back the door were still locked and he don’t have a key… and his shoes, one of them were up against the wall and the other one on the floor and still had a sock in it… and it was just his shoes, see?”

Sherlock’s eyes had slid closed about halfway through this monologue. The back of one hand rested on his forehead. He looked like a Victorian-era damsel in a faint. Eyes still shut, he managed, “I should tie you to something and force you to diagram that sentence.”

The poor boy was sitting there like he had no idea what to do now. Who knew what he’d heard about what went on at Baker Street. Probably afraid Sherlock would make good on the threat. Probably had no idea how to diagram a sentence in the first place. 

John jumped in, as usual. “Maybe your friend just went out?”

Oh great, the kid could still manage to look disdainful through his nerves. “Without ‘is shoes?”

“Maybe he borrowed a pair?”

“Naw, different sizes. He were always wantin’ to borrow my green Vans” –he held up a foot encased in a bright green canvas trainer— “but he couldn’t get into ‘em, could he?”

“Ok, so he didn’t borrow your shoes. You have windows in your flat?”

“Yeah I got windows.”

“What floor?”

“Ground level… but the windows was locked, wasn’t they?”

Sherlock was still slouched down in the chair, but his eyes had opened again. “ _Were_ they?”

“Yes, sir. They were.” 

“Does anyone else have a key to your flat?”

“No sir. Landlord’s a bit… nosy, so I changed the locks.”

“It’s only a matter of time before he finds out, you know. Best hide the drugs carefully, if you insist on having them.”

John thought the disapproving tone was a bit rich coming from Sherlock, the chemist behind the 7% solution, but he let it slide. Just like he let slide the fact that Sherlock got to be “sir” all of a sudden.

“So… will you take the case?”

“The case. I gather you are asking us to find out what happened to your friend?”

The young man nodded.

“Did you try to call him?”

“Yes sir.”

“Text?”

Another nod.

“Check his girlfriend’s house?”

“Boyfriend’s.”

“Minor detail. Did you?”

“Yes. He hasn’t been to work, either.”

“Interesting. He has a steady job, and you... It’s evening, but you don’t seem bothered that it’s off-hours… Unemployed?” His eyes narrowed. “Ah. You have… your own clients, don’t you? Rather not go to the police?”

No answer.

“All right. John, get his phone number.” To their visitor, Sherlock said, “We’ll call you.”

“Does that mean you’ll take my case?”

“Maybe. Don’t know yet. Give John your number and run along. Or don’t.” Sherlock lifted himself out of the chair and spiraled the few feet to the sofa, collapsing dramatically on his back across the cushions. “Well, do run along. The phone number is optional.” He’d already turned his head away by the time he added, “Have a good day.”

John dutifully took down the phone number, along with their potential client’s name and address and the name of his missing friend. He walked the kid down the stairs, past Mrs. Hudson’s door, and out onto the street. “We’ll let you know,” he said, feeling awkward, and watched the kid walk away. He was careful to lock the door again as he went inside. Mrs. Hudson never locked hers, and it wouldn’t do to have a drug dealer wandering back in. Not that their landlady wasn’t tough, he thought, recalling the time she’d brained a potential assassin with her second-favorite teapot. But still. Osteoporosis was a concern at her age… best not to chance it.

Back upstairs, Sherlock hadn’t budged from the couch. And why would he? This was his favorite sulking position, after all. 

John debated asking what he was thinking. But it had been a long day and an exhausting trip home, and dealing with any more of Sherlock being stroppy was, he decided, just not on. He thought about heading out to the pub two blocks over, see if he could stir up someone nice to have a chat with. Then he decided he’d probably just embarrass himself by falling asleep in his beer. 

Instead, he headed up to bed.


	4. Chapter 4

John slept late the next morning, covered a shift at University College London’s A&E, and then had a nice walk back through the park. He was thinking about one of the nurses, a pretty redhead who was hopelessly too young for him but flashed a bright smile in his direction every time she walked by. It was tempting to find out if he had a chance there… But too humiliating, he decided, if it turned out he didn’t. He didn’t need a reputation as some lecherous old doctor who wouldn’t leave the nurses alone.

Dusk had faded into evening and low clouds had started to gather when John climbed the stairs back up to 221B. He found the curtains drawn and Sherlock back on the sofa. In fact, if the sofa hadn’t been empty when John left that morning, he would have guessed Sherlock hadn’t moved at all. 

“Busy day, was it?” John asked him.

Sherlock didn’t reply.

All right, John thought. We’re still in _that_ mode.

He went to the kitchen and made some tea. He buttered some toast. He carried his snack back out to the sitting room, put the toast on the coffee table, and got comfortable in his armchair. He blew on his tea, took a sip, looked at the back of Sherlock’s head. “So?” he finally said.

Sherlock’s voice was muffled by the sofa cushions. “That woman.”

“Which woman? The one from the garden shed?”

“Of course the one from the garden shed. What other woman have we encountered lately? You certainly haven’t been having any luck in that dimension.”

John resisted the urge to dump his tea on Sherlock’s head. “What about her?”

Sherlock sat up, head in hands. Now he was talking to the floor, but at least it was an improvement. “She was young. Her abdomen was smooth so never pregnant, no children. She lived alone, or at least she was the only one there who gardened as a hobby. Probably did live alone, you’d think a roommate or a lover would be out there with the police or at least awake in the house, but there weren’t any lights on. You saw that shed, well cared for, swept clean. There was a neatly planted garden beyond it, vegetables, not flowers. But the lawn hadn’t been mowed. Practical, then, but—yes—a bit of a hedonist. Cared more about food than appearances. 

“I can tell you almost everything about her. But I can’t make that crime scene make sense.”

“I don’t get it.” John pushed the toast across to Sherlock, who took a piece without looking at it. “You love it when things don’t make sense. You jump up and down and act like someone gave you a puppy. So what’s wrong now?”

“Don’t be absurd. What would I do with a puppy?”

“Probably try to dissolve it in hydrochloric acid,” John admitted.

“I would not! Not a—“

“—psychopath,” John finished with him. “Right, bad joke, I’m sorry. But yeah, you’re not really a dog person, are you?”

Sherlock was silent.

“Look, we can get a dog if you—“

“John, you’re being an idiot.”

“That’s better. Knew you were in there. Now, what is it about these cases? Day before yesterday you walked off a crime scene. Which you do, yeah, but usually first you throw out some brilliant observation that leaves us all gaping. Then yesterday morning, your pretty much walked away again. What’s going on?”

Sherlock ate toast thoughtfully. He wasn’t talking, but it was a different silence than his defiant meal of Corn Flakes the day before. Finally he drank some of John’s tea, put the mug down. “There’s something not right about this. That woman had to have been killed there, there’s no other explanation for that pattern of blood spatter. And yet, with her limbs ripped from her body like that, there should have been so much more blood.”

“Maybe she was already dead before it happened?”

Sherlock shook his head. “Those spatters were arterial. Nothing else looks like that. But even if just the one arm or leg went before the head, there should have been more blood. On the walls, on the floor.”

“What if it wasn’t her blood?”

“It was.” Sherlock gestured to the table. John walked over, saw that the milk had been wiped up and the slides stacked neatly. Several gel electrophoresis kits were scattered across the surface. “It matches.”

“You took samples… Of course you did. So, ok, maybe she was injured someplace else and brought to the shed?” John realized as he said it that it didn’t make sense. “Right, no blood trail outside the door. Arm torn off at the shoulder, leg missing at the hip, no place to put a tourniquet. Maybe she was wrapped in plastic?”

“Yes John, brilliant, we have a murderer who partially dismembers his victims and then temporarily shrink-wraps them before, what? Did he change her clothes, so we wouldn’t know they’d gotten soaked through? Give her a bath, right there in the garden shed, and then take the time to paint the blood back on?”

“We’ve seen stranger things.”

“You’ve been going on cases without me, I suppose?”

“All right, maybe we haven’t. I still don’t see what you’re fussing about.”

“No, you don’t, do you. Or rather, you didn’t. You see, John, but you—“

“Don’t observe. I get it. What did I miss?”

“There was something moving in there, John.” Sherlock paused. He seemed to struggle for the words. “No, not _in_ there. _With_ there. The walls, the floor, the light— You didn’t see it, you wouldn’t have, it was only for a moment. You had to be _watching_. Something… dark. Something not right. Something...” He threw his hands up in frustration. “There aren’t _words_ for this. Whatever it was, _it’s not supposed to be there_.

“Maybe you need some more toast, Sherlock. When did you last eat?”

“I don’t need toast!” 

John ignored him, calmly going back to the kitchen and popping two more slices of whole wheat into the toaster. “Your hands are shaking. You want to pretend you’re just hungry, or you want to admit that you’re also terrified of something?”

“Something, yes… Something moving, just the other side of… what.” Suddenly Sherlock bounced to his feet. He crossed the sitting room in three strides, brushed past John in the kitchen, and disappeared into his bedroom. He reappeared before the toast had popped, dressed in black trousers and buttoning up a fitted blue shirt. By the time the toast was buttered, he had his coat on, scarf wrapped around his neck, and he was tapping his foot impatiently. “Come on, there’s no time for that. We’re going to see about a pair of shoes.” He started out the door, then stopped and turned back to John. “What was that address?”


	5. Chapter 5

There had been no answer at the kid’s phone number, so John used Google maps to locate the flat. It was mid-block on a street at the edge of Camberwell. South London, not convenient to Baker Street but not impossibly far. He’d tried to steer Sherlock toward taking the Tube and the train—“It’s right by Denmark Hill station!”—but a taxi had stopped for the expensive-looking bloke in the designer togs before they’d gone half a block. That must be why he’d been trailing behind me for once, John realized, instead of striding half a step ahead. 

Oh well. The cab was warm and dry as it cut through the evening drizzle, and John would make sure the fare didn’t come out of his own wallet. He did his best not to mind that Sherlock tapped his left foot for the entire half-hour drive. Except for the last few moments, when Sherlock looked over at John and said, sounding defensive, “Only 27 minutes. Not half an hour.” 

John didn’t even blink, anymore, when Sherlock did that sort of thing. “Well it _felt_ like half an hour. Or maybe a couple of lifetimes,” he added, even though that wasn’t true. He’d put up with Sherlock’s fidgeting for a lot longer than this if it led to catching criminals and maybe saving the day. Although he wasn’t sure how investigating a disappearing drug dealer and a pair of shoes would lead to much day-saving, really.

The taxi pulled up in front of a row of shops on a block that looked like it was trying to gentrify, but hadn’t quite gotten there yet. There was a Pizza Hut on the corner, its red sign glowing gently in the rain and the beginning of fog. Next to it was a frosted-glass door with scratched and faded numbers that matched the address entered in John’s phone.

Sherlock eyed the Pizza Hut as the cab slid to a stop at the curb. “The Americans really have won, haven’t they,” he sighed.

John didn’t think that required a reply, and anyway he was busy climbing out of the cab ahead of Sherlock so his flatmate would be left to pay.

He examined the door while Sherlock presumably handed over some cash. (At least, John didn’t hear any raised voices or an engine revving to run his flatmate over, so he assumed that’s what was happening.) The door was made of dented, rusting metal framing opaque glass. It looked like the sort that would lead to a narrow stairway and several floors of flats, but there was only a single buzzer. He was reaching out to try it when Sherlock stopped his hand.

Sherlock inclined his head toward the doorframe. “Not locked, John.”

Sure enough, the door was just the tiniest bit ajar. 

“Maybe I should try to call again.”

“Don’t bother, I don’t think he’ll answer.” Sherlock gave the door a gentle push. “Let’s see what we see.” He slid into the hall beyond, John following silently behind.

They came up against another door just a few steps inside. It was a short space, not even the depth of a typical entryway, the second door so sudden that John trod on Sherlock’s heels. Sherlock reached a hand behind to steady him as he pulled out his magnifying glass with the other. “Only one set of fingerprints on this doorknob,” he said, crowding John back against the first door as he leaned down to look. He turned, in what would have been one of his dramatic whirls if there’d been more than a couple of feet to move in. 

“Geez, hold on,” John yelped, trapped between the frosted glass and 6 feet of hyperactive detective. He squeezed back outside and left Sherlock to examine the doorknob on the outer door. “Many fingerprints on this one,” came Sherlock’s voice, sounding satisfied with what he’d found so far. There was a funny echo that John couldn’t quite reconcile with the tiny space.

When Sherlock spoke again, the echo was gone. “Definitely a drug dealer, John. And he was telling the truth about being the only one with a key. His customers come through the first door, which is open, but they know to knock on the second. That young man—what was his name?”

John consulted his phone. “Ian. Ian Morris.”

“Ian Morris…” Sherlock rolled that around in his mouth for a moment, then shrugged. “Doesn’t mean a thing to me. Anyhow, young Ian would check through the Judas hole here—“

“The what?”

“Judas—Oh honestly John, haven’t you read the dictionary? ‘Judas hole, a one-way peephole in a door.’” He seemed to take John’s blank look as lack of understanding, instead of _holy god, you actually memorized the dictionary_ , and continued, “Never mind, here. This.” Kicking the outside door open so John could see, he indicated a large brass peephole at eye level in the inner door. 

Both peephole and door looked out of place in the cheaply paneled hallway. There was a transom light above the outer door, but none above the inner. The inner door was dark wood, heavy, worn now but once highly polished. It had curved upper panels, carved with lilies and irises, and three square lower ones featuring lush, wide-bladed grass. The wood had chipped away in places, but the high quality of the carving was plain. The Judas hole was a two-inch ring of cast brass with a convex, slightly wavy lens at the center. John squeezed past Sherlock again and took a look. The glow of electric light was visible behind the lens, but no shapes could be made out in the room beyond.

Then, as he watched, a shadow moved across the light.

“Sherlock!” John hissed. “Someone’s here.”

Sherlock simply reached up a leather-gloved hand and knocked on the door. There was no answer. From inside the flat, there was a rustling sound, then a creaking noise like an old wooden ship at anchor. All was silent again for a moment, and John and Sherlock stood pressed together in the tiny hallway, listening. 

Sherlock reached to knock again. Before his knuckles connected with the central panel, the rustling began again inside the flat. It was cut off suddenly, simply disappeared into silence as if someone had turned off a radio.

John put his eye back to the peephole. Darkness for a moment and then he must have adjusted the angle without realizing it, because there was that warm yellow light again, filling up the thick circle of glass.

The hall, and the flat beyond, remained silent. And then suddenly there was a thump—a crash—something flew at John’s eye, and he jumped back as darkness filled the lens.

“Ow,” said Sherlock. 

John shuffled forward again, off the toes of the handmade leather shoes. As he did so, there was another crash. The wooden door shook. This was followed by a strange sound, almost a keen but pitched too low. And again, silence.

“Step aside, John,” Sherlock said.

John managed to turn his head enough to shoot him a glance. “Step aside _how?_ ” 

Sherlock didn’t reply, but he shuffled to the edge of the hall so that he and John could trade places. “You’ll want to be outside for the next fifteen seconds,” he said.

“Why, what are you—oh, never mind.” John exited the front door and waited on the street while he counted down slowly, measured beats. 12—11—10— at 8, there was a splintering crash and he leapt back into the abbreviated hallway, where Sherlock was brushing his trousers off in front of a mass of splinters that had been the inner door.

Oh, right, thought John. _Baritsu_. He’d been ribbing Sherlock for months that there was no such martial art. Maybe he’d have to do a little more research on that.

“Come on, John.” Sherlock had to duck to get through the opening. John was able to stand upright to follow.

The room matched the door. It had seen better days but had once been quite fine, with carved molding running along the ceiling and wide wood edging framing the floor. 

It was also empty.

Three of the four walls featured a chair rail, with gaps where pieces had fallen away. There was an open fireplace on the far wall with a marble mantle, chipped now and splattered with the same brownish paint that covered the walls. The floor was hardwood, the polish scuffed and abraded away in a path leading from the door to a battered sofa, its cushions stained and concave. A second path led to a rumpled double bed. In between was a table that had served as a makeshift kitchen, hot plate and electric kettle standing in for stove and sink. The table was on its side now, the hot plate overturned, the kettle with its lid popped off and surrounded by a puddle. 

A door near the bed probably led to a bathroom. Sherlock had already poked his head in and pronounced, “Empty.” He had checked beneath the bed, too, and below the sofa, and even twisted himself to peer up the chimney. “No one here.”

There was a pair of black Doc Martens near the ancient sofa. John guessed these were the shoes young Ian had come to tell them about. One of them was, indeed, resting against the wall, its sole pointing out into the room. John leaned in to look for clues. The shoe wasn’t just leaning against the wall. The leather upper was—could it possibly be—actually _in_ the wall. John wasn’t sure what to make of that. An optical illusion? An art project? Sherlock would probably have something snide to say if he pointed it out before thinking it through.

Between the bed and the bathroom door lay another shoe. It was a bright green canvas high-top with black laces. John scanned the room for its mate, but it was nowhere to be seen. 

He walked over to have a closer look.

“Er, Sherlock?” he heard himself saying, voice a bit faint. “There’s a foot still in here.”

“That’s fine, John,” Sherlock answered absently, running his eyes over the chair rail.

“Sherlock, did you hear me?” The initial shock gone, John had his voice back. “There’s a foot. Here. In this shoe. No one attached to it, mind you.”

“Yes, all right, not important right now.” Now Sherlock was standing with his arms outstretched, making strange hops sideways across the room.

“Sherlock!”

He stopped, finally looking like he’d heard John call his name. “For goodness sake, John, what is the matter?”

John went over, put his hands on Sherlock’s back, and steered him over to the shoe. “This.”

“Fine, we’ll get to that in a minute,” Sherlock said, shaking John off like he was a particularly annoying puppy. “Haven’t you noticed this room?”

“Well, I’m standing in it, if that’s what you mean.”

“It doesn’t make sense! It doesn’t make any more sense than that tiny foyer or the spectacularly carved wood or the cast brass Judas hole, which you have to admit is a more appropriate term than peephole for a door that was hand-carved about 100 years ago.”

“It’s a room,” said John, looking around. “Probably nice once, seen better days. Cut-rate flat, just right for a small time dealer. So?”

“It’s the wrong _shape_ , John,” Sherlock said, sliding his hand along the wall where it joined the doorframe. “It can’t be here, doesn’t _fit_. You saw the shops to either side. That pizza shop, it’s square inside. The wall goes right back, from the front door of this flat to the back of the building. Maybe a foot to the side, no more. The shop on the left, selling those atrocious ‘antiques’—cheap imitations from Asia, how do people not notice? Same configuration. Square, goes back to…” he strode across the room, all the way to the back wall, where he pushed aside a faded bed sheet serving as a curtain. There was a window behind it, barred, with about a foot of space before the brick wall beyond. Sherlock leaned his head against the glass and craned his neck to look upward. “Sliver of sky. That’s outside. But outside _where?_ ”

He unlatched the window, opened it, started to reach through. John was there in an instant, hand on his wrist. “Don’t.”

Sherlock gazed back at him startled, eyes wide.

“Bad idea,” John added, gently pushing Sherlock’s hand down to his side. He couldn’t believe he was buying into this, Sherlock had to be mistaken. The thing was, Sherlock wasn’t mistaken very often. “Anything could be out there.”

And as he followed Sherlock’s gaze back out the window, anything _was_. 

It was dark out there. A moment ago, the room’s light had cast a yellow square against the bricks across the way, but that glow had vanished. Something rustled in the narrow alleyway between the window and—but the wall beyond was gone. 

The wall was gone. The bars were still on the window, but the air beyond was wavering and through it there were… shapes. Something with teeth hovered behind something with five limbs. Something with too many eyes crept toward the window and it looked wrong, so _wrong_ , and John took a step back.

Sherlock leaned forward. Fascination was radiating off him, gleaming from his grey eyes. 

The thing with teeth was closer. It didn’t walk or roll or hop, it didn’t slither, it didn’t have legs exactly but it didn’t not have them either. It moved in a way that made the hair on John’s neck stand up. It made him want to scramble back out the splintered door and through the tiny hallway and out onto the street where he could stand under a streetlight and people would pass him and taxis and buses would come by.

The thing with teeth stopped just the other side of the window.

Sherlock had broken out in a sweat, a rivulet running down his neck to disappear into the collar of the blue shirt. But he didn’t back up, didn’t even move.

Moments passed.

Then Sherlock’s hand rose, a fluid motion, and he reached through the bars.

The thing with five limbs crossed the open space and was on him in an instant. Thin appendages with many claws—not hands, not quite—dug into the flesh of Sherlock’s arm, scraping long, bloody gashes over and over again. The thing’s frenzied violence stopped only when John leapt forward, grabbed Sherlock below the shoulders, and yanked him back into the room.

The thing receded a foot or two and remained there, all but motionless, on the other side of the bars. 

The thing with too many eyes hadn’t moved. It watched them.

Blood dripped from Sherlock’s fingers onto the cheap throw rug that covered the center of the floor. He fumbled for his phone, reaching across with his good hand to try to pull it from the opposite pocket of his coat, then gave up as his face turned pale. “John,” he croaked out, “Call Lestrade.”

John was already dialing emergency services.

“No, not 999. What do you think they’re going to do about this? Call Ghostbusters? No, John. Lestrade. Just tell him to come.” And with that, Sherlock’s 6-foot frame hit the floor.


	6. Chapter 6

John got all the way to the third 9 before he thought better of it, hung up, and dialed Lestrade’s private number. 

The DI answered on the second ring. “What’s he gone and done now?”

“You wouldn’t believe it,” John told him. “If I give you an address, will you come?”

“It’s ten o’clock, John. I’m off duty. Call the Yard.” 

“Trust me, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

Lestrade sighed through the phone. “I’m watching telly. Gordon Ramsay’s about to rip someone a new one. I’m at home, John. I’m in my slippers. I’m drinking beer.”

“I’m texting you the address,” said John, and hung up. He’d learned a few tricks from Sherlock, along the way.

 

By the time the DI arrived, Sherlock’s arm was wrapped in a clean T-shirt that John had unearthed from a plastic crate near the bed. Blood was seeping through it, but the cuts didn’t look too drastic. Some of them would need stitches, or at least super-glue, but it could wait a bit. 

John was more worried about what contaminants the creature might have carried. He’d forced Sherlock to shuck his coat and scarf and fine cotton shirt and stick his whole arm in the shower. Sherlock had managed to hold still for an entire minute—John counting down carefully on his phone—before whirling away, snatching his shirt from the doorknob, and sliding it back onto his body. He now had a big swath of wet down the side but the shirt was once again neatly buttoned and tucked in, the right arm looking pristine although the left was a shredded, bloody mess. He’d left the coat where John had laid it on the bed, sparing it one sad look before taking a breath and straightening his shoulders.

 

Lestrade had traded his slippers for a pair of polished loafers. He was dressed in jeans, scuffed leather bomber jacket, and a faded t-shirt with a football team logo on the front. His hair, usually neatly combed, was sticking up in a cowlick in the back. 

He walked into the flat and went right up to Sherlock, who was sitting on the floor with his back against the bed, looking even paler than usual. “Jesus, Sherlock, what’ve you done to yourself?”

Sherlock looked back haughtily. “Are my injuries the most remarkable thing you see here, Lestrade? I mourn for the future of Scotland Yard.”

“No, you toff, I already noticed that this room can’t possibly exist. Seems to me that if you’re still in it, it’s probably not going anywhere though. Bit more important if you’re bleeding to death.”

“John is here, and you can see for yourself that he is perfectly calm. Therefore it’s obvious I am not bleeding to death.”

“Bloody hell,” Lestrade muttered. “If you’re going to insult me, I’m going back to Gordon Ramsay. At least he’s entertaining.”

Sherlock managed to keep his mouth shut while John explained what had happened. Lestrade started to look more and more concerned, shooting Sherlock “Has he gone crazy? Are we safe in here with him?” sorts of glances. He didn’t look terribly reassured when Sherlock told him, “It’s true, Lestrade. At least, it seems it’s true. Certainly we have the evidence here.” He held up his injured arm. “John and I are going to pay a visit to the lab at Bart’s, see if we’ve been exposed to any hallucinogens. In the meantime you’ll want to do something about this.”

Lestrade followed Sherlock’s casual gesture and noticed the green canvas shoe for the first time. “Crap, Sherlock. There’s a foot in there!”

“Yes,” Sherlock agreed amiably. “We’ll stop by the Yard in the morning in case you need anything.” And he swept to his feet and on out the door. John followed, looking apologetic. 

Lestrade watched them go with a long-suffering sigh. Then he pulled out his cell phone. “Sally? Can you round up Anderson and the rest of the team? I need you to meet me at a crime scene.”

 

“There’s blood on the floor, here.” Anderson followed the trail to the window, treading carefully with blue paper booties over his shoes. He assigned a tech to take samples, then moved back past the bed and into the bathroom. “The victim must have been dead before the foot was severed,” he said, his voice echoing off the tiles. “There’s not enough blood to be from that sort of injury. Someone’s cleaned off blood in the shower, though. Maybe the victim fought back.” 

He emerged back into the main room, his head down as he traced the blood trail to the bed. “We could be looking for a murderer with wounds severe enough to leave this pattern of—Aw, seriously?!”

He’d finally noticed the Belstaff coat with the shredded sleeve that was still draped across the bed. Peeking out from underneath it was a familiar blue scarf. “What are you playing at, Lestrade?” 

Sergeant Donovan, who had been making a list of open hours at the nearby shops, looked up from her phone and saw Anderson gesturing at the coat. “Please tell me someone else out there is that ostentatious.”

“That can’t be the only copy of that coat in existence,” Lestrade admitted. “But yeah. It’s him.”

Anderson said sourly, “Please tell me he’s the one missing the foot.”

“Can you picture him wearing canvas trainers? Green canvas trainers?”

“How should I know what he does when he’s not swanning around on my crime scenes?” 

“It’s his blood, isn’t it?” said Donovan. “You let him leave the scene when he was _clearly_ involved?”

“Well…” Lestrade felt a bit flustered, a feeling he really didn’t like. This was his team, and his crime scene, and if he’d let Sherlock and John leave without interrogating them he’d had a damn good reason. It’s just that for the moment he couldn’t remember what that was. “We know where to find him,” he finished lamely. “He and John had to go off to Bart’s.”

Sally shook her head. “You’re too soft on him, Greg. This is looking like one of his locked room mysteries, the ones he gets off on so much. Usually he doesn’t arrive on the scene until after we do, and then he has to spend ages sniffing around. This time he calls you, he’s bled all over the floor, and he’s practically gone by the time you get here. And it doesn’t make you wonder if that” –she indicated the green canvas shoe—“is actually his doing?”

Greg didn’t like to admit that he did have some worry along those lines. John’s story was positively fanciful, but something really had happened to Sherlock’s arm. He had his doubts that it was planned by Sherlock, though—he would never have deliberately let something happen to his beloved long grey coat. Could it have been an accident while he was setting the scene for a mystery?

More likely, and he hated even to think it, was that John had finally gone off the deep end. Sherlock would cover for him, that was certain. If John had—and Sherlock had tried to stop him—well, it was a more likely scenario than alien creatures outside the window. Except, and he couldn’t quite bring himself to mention it, there was the matter of this room. And its being impossible. And the fact that, if he admitted it to himself, it wasn’t the first time he’d encountered such a thing.

Anderson was looking smug as he took swabs from the sleeve of Sherlock’s coat. “I’ll bet you a tenner that it’s not just his blood on here. Bet you twenty it matches the blood from the victim. And then we just have to get that before a judge and we’ll have a warrant to search our favorite psychopath’s flat—”

Donovan cut him off. “Shut it for a minute, would you Anderson?” 

_I should have known it wouldn’t take Donovan long to cotton on_ , thought Lestrade. He observed with pride that his protégé didn’t just blurt it out, though. She turned a slow circle, looking like Sherlock for a moment as she gazed intently at the walls. Then, “You see it too, don’t you sir?”

“I do, Sally. We’ll discuss it after, yeah?”

Anderson was looking from one of them to the other. “See what?”

 

The crime scene photographed, sampled, and put to bed, and most of the team dismissed, Lestrade quietly asked Donovan to follow him home. She’d looked startled for a moment, asked “Won’t we wake your wife?”

Lestrade heard the subtext and answered directly, “Yes we’re back together, yes she’s home, and no I’m not trying to get into your knickers. Although,” he continued, a bit sheepish, “I am going to invite you into my bedroom.”

“I’m trusting you on this, sir,” Donovan said.

Lestrade hoped she still would, after he saw what he was about to show her. He gave Donovan his address and climbed back into his 15-year-old sedan. She shrugged into her leather jacket and followed, and Lestrade forced down a surge of envy when he saw why she’d forgone her usual high heels tonight. Apparently a Triumph Street Triple motorcycle was Donovan’s off-duty ride of choice. She looked like a natural on it. 

 

Lestrade’s wife was a beauty, smooth clear skin and tousled blonde hair, and she wasn’t happy about being woken up. She stalked out of the bedroom and brushed past Donovan without a word. Lestrade seemed about to try to catch her, but instead he ushered Donovan on in to the bedroom.

The door he opened revealed a clothes closet, pressed shirts sharing space with trousers on hangers. Donovan raised her eyebrows at him. He simply pointed.

And then she saw. There was a twin to the closet beside it, a second door just to the left, a second closet rod, this one supporting silky blouses and smart skirts. On the floor were lined up several pairs of pumps. 

Too many. The closet must have been deeper than its mate, because there was room for three rows of shoes where Lestrade’s closet only had room for two. It also had about two feet of extra space to the right of the door… Where it couldn’t possibly be. 

She looked in Lestrade’s closet again. She looked in his wife’s closet. And then she looked at him a bit sadly. “She never noticed, did she?”

“I don’t know,” he told her. “It was just easier to let her have that one. And to let it be.”

 

Back at Scotland Yard, Lestrade and Donovan sipped at coffee and shared a box of donuts. It was going to take a lot of donuts, Lestrade thought, to get their heads around this properly. Possibly every donut that ever was. 

They weren’t even talking. Donovan had said, “You honestly never thought about it?” And Lestrade had said, “It seemed to be one of those things you don’t want to think too hard about.” And then Donovan had said, “Do you think…?” And Lestrade had said, “Yes, I think I do.” 

And that was it, except for “I need a refill” and “Do you take sugar?”

Lestrade was on his second coffee and third donut when Anderson burst in. “You’re not going to like this.” He sounded positively gleeful. “He’s gone and done it, and now I’ve got proof.”

“Proof of what?” Lestrade said, wondering where this was leading. 

“Proof that you’ve got to stop letting Holmes onto crime scenes. He bled on the evidence, Lestrade. He’s got his DNA all mixed up with that severed foot. I can hardly find a shred of evidence that doesn’t point to him. There’s blood all over the floor, he washed the shower clean, he broke down the door for god’s sake. I swear sir, if you don’t do something about this, I _am_ going to make a case against him.”

Lestrade scrubbed at his face with his hands. Would his superiors mind if he added a drop of scotch to the canteen coffee? Surely not, if they knew what he was going through.

“Let’s have your full report, Anderson. Did you find anything else?”

“Well, there was a very expensive wool coat that’s seen better days. Getting fibers all over the bed and mucking up the evidence.”

“Yes, all right. What else?”

Anderson sat down and took a donut. “Nothing,” he said around a mouthful of powdered sugar. “There are prints from the victim and some others we’re pretty sure are from his friends. No blood from the victim, except what was found on the foot at the scene. The only blood on the coat, or anywhere else really, belongs to Sherlock Holmes.” He took another bite, sugar dusting his chin. “No sign of the body, either. There’s a corpse out there that’s missing a foot. At least, I hope it’s a corpse.”

Donovan handed him a napkin. “Constable Collins called all the hospitals. He wasn’t treated anywhere nearby. Don’t know how far he’d get without a foot.”


	7. Chapter 7

A sleepy-eyed Molly Hooper let Sherlock and John into the lab at Bart’s. Sherlock had called and gotten her out of bed. “It’s a murder case, Molly. You’re welcome to sleep if you don’t mind someone else dying.” 

And then he refused to let Molly fuss over his arm. He also refused to go to A&E. He tapped his foot impatiently while John scrubbed the wounds again and then closed the worst ones using a tube of super-glue they found in the back of one of Molly’s desk drawers.

John fully expected that what followed would be a rather embarrassing battery of tests, including urine drug screens and multiple samples of blood that would wind up under the microscope. So he was astonished when Sherlock, no longer bleeding, stood up and said, “We’re going home.”

“Wait, why did we come all the way to the lab, then? We have super-glue at home. We have suture material at home. We have food and tea at home. Molly has a home, too, and she was sleeping in it.”

“Yes,” said Sherlock absently, “I’m sorry Molly.” He was looking around the room as though he’d misplaced something. Then he seemed to remember. “John, may I borrow your scarf?”

“Oh. Sure.” John untangled his wool scarf from his coat, which he’d tossed over a chair. Sherlock wrapped it around his own neck, looking a bit lost and cold. 

“So why are we here, Sherlock?” John shot an apologetic glance at Molly. “You said you wanted to check for hallucinogens.” 

“No need, John. The sequence of events, the crime scenes, my injuries… I don’t believe we imagined any of it. It would be a waste of time.”

“Would it?” said John. “You always say that once you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Well, what I saw tonight was pretty damned impossible. Seriously, way beyond improbable and into the realm of straightjackets and antipsychotic medications. So I think it might be worth it to do some eliminating here.”

Molly looked from John to Sherlock and back again. “What are the two of you talking about?”

Sherlock had shifted into his thinking mode, or possibly his sulking mode—as usual hard to tell, but at any rate he didn’t answer. So John did. He did his best to avoid phrases like “alternate dimension” and “bigger on the inside.”

Ten minutes later Molly was bustling about the lab, forehead creased with worry, gathering up test tubes and syringes and typing orders in the hospital’s computer system. “We’ll put you in as demo patients, checks on the system. I don’t think you want your own names associated with this.” 

Sherlock didn’t say a word, but he held his arm out and let Molly take her samples. She took several tubes of blood from each of them and did indeed make them give urine samples in little yellow cups. John helped her spin the blood samples down in the centrifuge. And then the samples were off with a “whoosh,” sliding into the vacuum tube system and on to the central testing lab.

Two hours later—two hours of Sherlock sitting like a statue, while John and Molly made awkward conversation and she tried not to let on that she thought John had lost his marbles—the tests were all back. They were entirely clean. 

“Of course those tests only look for the obvious hallucinogens.” John and Molly both jumped as Sherlock suddenly came to life. “We could be high on sassafras and no one would be the wiser.”

“Sassafras, really Sherlock?”

“In large enough quantities, yes. Although I think we’d have noticed if someone were supplying us with enormous amounts of homemade root beer. Now,” Sherlock said, rising smoothly and settling on a high stool in front of his usual microscope. “We have work to do.”

“I thought you wanted to go home. It’s 4am. Molly’s been here long enough.”

“A moment ago you were angry with me for making her come in. Now you want me to send her home, just when things are getting interesting?” Sherlock turned to Molly. “Molly, there are holes in the fabric of the universe, and scary monsters are coming through. You never know, some of them may literally be underneath your bed. Do you want to go home and sleep, or do you want to stay here and help us?”

Molly looked pale. “What do you need me to do?”

“This.” Sherlock took a fragment of wood from the pocket of his black wool gabardine trousers. John noticed that even with her eyes still wide at what Sherlock had said, Molly’s gaze followed his hand to that pocket and the impossibly good fit of the fabric. Hell, even John wondered how Sherlock managed to get anything into those pockets at all.

“This came from Ian Morris’s apartment.” He handed the wood to Molly. “I’ll need it prepared and sectioned. Now, please, Molly.”

Molly jumped to, taking the wood from Sherlock’s fingers and turning on a Bunsen burner. 

“Scissors, John.” Sherlock held out his hand, already reaching with the other for a fresh microscope slide. 

As if John had any idea where to find a pair of scissors. But he knew there wasn’t half a chance of Sherlock trying to find them himself. He went through a couple of drawers while the great detective just sat there with his left hand out. Finally John slapped a pair of safety shears into Sherlock’s grasp. Sherlock didn’t look at them, just continued laying out equipment with his right hand. “We’ll need to get my shirt off,” he muttered in the direction of the microscope.

This was followed by the sound of Molly dropping an Erlenmeyer flask. Sherlock looked around at her. “Right. John, maybe you could just cut off this sleeve?”

John considered, for a moment, swallowing his pride and serving as a sort of forensic tailor for the overgrown child at the microscope. “You have the scissors. The men’s room is that way.”

“We’re wasting time, John.”

“Oh fine.” John took the scissors back and snipped through the rich blue Egyptian cotton broadcloth at the shoulder. He found himself wishing, just for a moment, that they weren’t safety shears. There was no way to accidentally stab his flatmate with these things.

Moments later the fine cotton Sherlock was gazing intently through the ocular lenses at fine cotton shreds. When Molly came over to offer him a sliver of wood prepared on a slide, he didn’t even look up. “Not now, Molly,” he said to the microscope stage.

Her face fell, and she took an uncertain step backward. “I’ll just… put this here…”

Sherlock moved aside. “Take a look, John.”

John gently pushed Molly forward, instead. “Go on, you can tell me what you see.”

She stayed at the microscope for a long time, carefully moving the slide and adjusting the focus and magnification. Finally she looked up at Sherlock. “What are they?”

“No idea.”

John took Molly’s place at the eyepiece. The blue fibers from Sherlock’s shirt were clearly visible under the 10X objective lens. They were wet with saline under the cover slip, and there were lots of red blood cells spread out around them. There were a few epithelial cells, as well, and—what the hell was _that?_ Lodged up against the cotton was a triangular cell unlike anything John had come across in his medical training. It looked like it had a double wall and, yes, three nuclei. John increased the magnification but it didn’t look any less strange. He followed along the cotton thread and found several more of these cells.

Sherlock was already crowding him at the microscope. He seemed to have forgotten that he had asked John to look. “What did you do with the wood sample?” he snapped at Molly.

“Um—“ Molly fumbled for it, managed to get it to Sherlock’s hand without the slide shattering on the floor. “It’s ready to go.”

Sherlock slotted the slide onto the stage and adjusted the magnification. He looked at it for a few seconds, and then, “Oh!” He sat up straight, eyes wide for a moment, and then the lids drifted closed. “I should have known.”

John leaned in to take a look, and Sherlock leaned back just a bit to let him. “Molly?” John asked calmly. “Will you tell me if you see what I see?”

Molly just stood there looking uncertain until both John and Sherlock realized that they needed to make room for her. They both stepped back from the microscope, giving her some space.

“It’s… moving,” she breathed after a moment. “How can it be moving?”

“Not moving,” said Sherlock, although he looked at Molly with approval. John guessed it was because she hadn’t fainted dead away. “Fading. You’re seeing _through_ it, Molly. This is a sample from the wooden coving on the wall of Ian Morris’s flat. You get it, don’t you? The bars on the window may have been useful for John and me tonight, but they were completely pointless for Ian and his friend. The window wasn’t the way in at all.

“Hopefully this piece is too small for anything to come through,” he added thoughtfully.

“F-for what to come through?” Molly stammered.

“I told you already, Molly, weren’t you listening?” Sherlock rose from the stool and clicked off the microscope light. He adjusted John’s scarf around his own neck. “Monsters.”

 

Standing in the doorway outside Bart’s, Sherlock shivered in the chill of the early London morning until a cab, warm and yellow-lit inside, pulled up to take him home. John gave Molly an apologetic kiss on the cheek and climbed in after him.

“You have a portal to an alternate dimension in your pocket.” John figured he could trust the cabbie to ignore them. The partition was closed, and after all cabdrivers were supposed to be “of good character.” It wouldn’t be polite for him to jump into the conversation. 

Sherlock’s reply, a mildly annoyed “Yes,” was followed by silence.

John waited, but that was it. “Seriously, for real. A portal. To an alternate dimension. Out of which monsters—all right, very small monsters—could emerge any minute.”

“Yes, John. Is there a reason you’re repeating the obvious?”

“Are we going to do something about this?”

“Do what? Run around screaming? Arm ourselves with pitchforks? What do people usually do in this sort of situation, John?”

“This sort of situation doesn’t exist, Sherlock!”

“Obviously, it does.”

John couldn’t argue with that. “I don’t know what people do. If we were in a movie, yes, we probably would arm ourselves with pitchforks. Or flamethrowers. Or RPGs. In real life… I suspect most people would try to ignore it. The way we pull the covers over our heads when we’re kids afraid of the monster in the closet.”

Sherlock was quiet again. He had taken the fragment of wood from his pocket and was watching it intently. It shimmered, just a bit, under his gaze. Then, slowly, “Yes, people do ignore what they don’t understand, don’t they? They try to go on as normal, pretend that nothing’s—" He stopped for a moment, mouth half open. Then he leaned forward, rapped briskly on the partition, and ordered “Change of plans. New Scotland Yard. Now.”


	8. Chapter 8

The cab pulled up in front of the building on Broadway and Sherlock was out like a shot, striding up to the glass doors while John fumbled for his wallet. Sherlock had dialed Lestrade’s number multiple times, punching the “end” button ruthlessly each time it rang through to voicemail. He wouldn’t explain, but John was well aware that Sherlock never made actual phone calls unless the matter was urgent. Sherlock dropped his phone in a tray as he passed through the metal detector and immediately snatched it up again on the other side, redialing without breaking his stride.

John had gotten so accustomed to the absurdity of this day, it hadn’t occurred to him that Sherlock’s appearance at the moment might cause alarm. 

It was apparent that Sherlock hadn’t thought of this, either. He looked astonished when a tall, burly officer at the security station rose to stop this apparition with its tousled hair, missing sleeve, and bloodied arm dotted with super-glue. 

“Are you expected, sir?” At least the guard was polite.

Sherlock wasn’t. “There’s no time for this. We need to see Inspector Lestrade.”

“I’m sure you do,” the guard said, sounding a bit patronizing. “And just what do you need to see him for?”

“Eventually, I think, saving the universe. For the moment, he may be interested in rescuing his daughter from some rather violent beings from beyond the walls of our reality.”

John’s head was already in his hands as the guard signaled for backup. 

“I think you’d best come with me,” the guard said, laying a hand on Sherlock’s good arm to steer him away from the entrance. 

The small crowd that had gathered got to watch—and John peeked through his fingers—as Sherlock threw off the guard’s hand and started for the elevator bank. “No,” he shot back over his shoulder. “I think it would be best if you let me get on with saving the world. That is, if you want it to still be here for your assignation this weekend with Officer Morris over there.”

And that was it. It was a matter of moments before four uniformed officers and one in plainclothes had Sherlock pinned to the ground and in handcuffs. 

John, left behind as they carted his flatmate away, wondered if the cash he had in his account would be enough for bail this time. It was just plain embarrassing to think of having to ask Mrs. Hudson for another loan.

 

The door to Lestrade’s office was closed. Sherlock wouldn’t have hesitated to whisk it open, but John didn’t want to push his luck. 

“Er, excuse me,” he said to the fresh-faced young constable at the nearest desk. “I’m here to see Detective Inspector Lestrade. We had an appointment,” he added, hoping that Greg would play along. “Is he in?”

“I think so sir.” The young officer rose and knocked at Lestrade’s office. “Sir? Someone here to see you. A Mr. …?”

“John Watson,” he supplied.

“We were wondering when you’d turn up!” Lestrade’s welcoming gesture was just a bit too broad. “Let him in, Hawkins.” As usual, Lestrade was already looking past John, clearly expecting to see someone else. “Isn’t he with you?”

Dammit, Sherlock still managed to be the center of attention even when he was locked up in a different part of the building. John took his time, counting to ten before he answered, so he wouldn’t say anything he’d regret.

Lestrade eyes were a bit bloodshot. Donovan was slouched in the chair across from him, her usual straight posture abandoned. Anderson looked up blearily from the other visitors’ chair.

“We weren’t drinking it,” Lestrade said, sounding a bit defensive, as John’s gaze rested on the Scotch bottle sitting half-empty on the desk. “We were just looking at it.”

What they had been doing, based on the evidence, was eating a lot of donuts and drinking a _lot_ of coffee. There were four paper cups on the desktop and Donovan and Anderson each held one in their hands. Lestrade took a swig from the cup closest to him and made a face.

The door banged open behind John. “Where is it?”

Lestrade, Donovan, and Anderson gaped. John was reminded of the morning Sherlock had arrived home drenched in blood, carrying a harpoon, and annoyed that he’d had so much trouble hailing a cab. He didn’t look the least bit embarrassed now. In fact, John could feel the urgency radiating off him.

Even now, though, Sherlock couldn’t resist pausing for a deduction. “Six coffee cups… I see you haven’t finished the second box of donuts yet. Kudos on your restraint. No matter how much sugar and caffeine you ingest, it won’t make it untrue. Now, Lestrade. Where?”

“Where what, Sherlock?”

“Where is it? It is in your house, isn’t it? What, extra space in the attic? A bit of storage in the garage? Oh don’t tell me… it’s not _actually_ your bedroom closet?”

It was Donovan who answered. “How did you--?”

Sherlock shot her a narrow-eyed look, just for a moment. John could see the wheels turning. Then Sherlock shook his head, muttering, “Impossible.” 

Donovan looked like she wasn’t sure whether to be insulted or gratified. She settled for clarifying, “His wife was home. He just showed me.”

“I’m sure he did,” Anderson interjected sourly. Donovan looked like she was about to turn on him, but Sherlock cut them both off. 

“You can have your lovers’ spat later. We are going to Lestrade’s house. Now.”

“Why?” asked Lestrade, obviously puzzled.

Sherlock held out the fragment of wood. “This.”

“It’s a piece of wood.”

“It’s not just a piece of wood. Is your wife at home? Is your daughter? We need to go, now.” Sherlock was already on the way out the door. He turned back, agitated, to find Lestrade still at his desk.

“Sherlock, what are you on about? My daughter is fine. My wife is with her. They’re probably having a nice breakfast. She would call me if anything—“

“Call them. Call them _now_.”

Lestrade did, taking his cell phone from his pocket, staring at Sherlock all the while. “Ellie? It’s daddy. Everything ok there? No, just… checking on you. Love to your mother, yeah? See you tonight.”

“They’re fine, Sherlock. What—“

Sherlock was practically shaking with urgency. “They are not fine. We have to—“

The phone on Lestrade’s desk rang. Still watching Sherlock, he lifted the handset to his ear. “Lestrade.” A moment’s pause, then, “Hold on.” He looked at Donovan and Anderson, eyebrows raised. After a second Donovan nodded and Anderson said, “Oh, all right, fine.”

“We’re on our way.” Lestrade reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a dress shirt, still in its paper wrapper from the cleaners. He tossed it to Sherlock on the way out the door. 

Sherlock frowned at the rough fabric, but he shrugged out of his ruined blue shirt and into the white oxford cloth before following the others out of the office.

 

Lestrade had absolutely refused to go to his house instead of to the crime scene. He’d also threatened to arrest Sherlock if he went there on his own. “And don’t you even think about it either,” he told John. “I will not have the two of you scaring my daughter. Or my wife. You can come with us now, or you can go home. To your _own_ home. Not mine.”

Their car followed behind Lestrade’s to Guildford, about an hour’s drive southwest of central London. Rush hour traffic was already backed up going into the city, but the reverse direction wasn’t nearly as bad. John was thankful he’d talked Sherlock into riding in a police car, for once. He could only imagine what the taxi fare would have been. It was an unmarked car, which seemed to make Sherlock a little less edgy.

The car bumped down cobblestoned streets, past 17th-century buildings and high-end shops. John watched fine fabrics and ridiculously expensive denim float by and wondered if he’d ever be able to afford to shop here.

The line of police cars continued through town and followed a road curving to the south. The spaces between buildings widened, until they were passing though countryside. They finally pulled up at a stone barn with red doors, behind a white house with wheat fields all around. The colors were plain in the morning light, while the flashing blue-and-reds looked washed out and pale.

The inside of the barn was a different shade of red. Just inside the door, there was a hand. The forearm was a few steps further on. The humerus was still attached to the shoulder, but the shoulder wasn’t attached to anything. White bones were smeared with blood.

There was so much blood on the floor, John found himself wishing he could have stopped off at home for a pair of Wellies. He sat patiently on the hood of a police car, coat wrapped tight and collar turned up, while the homicide team took first crack at the scene.

Sherlock, meanwhile, was bouncing on his toes, fidgeting with his hands, walking back and forth across the driveway and muttering to himself. He looked as though his own timeline were sped up a few ticks from everyone else’s. 

“Aren’t they done yet?” he groaned, as members of the homicide team took careful pictures and placed samples in evidence bags. “Lestrade, you need to listen to me. We are wasting time!”

Finally Anderson handed John a pair of waterproof booties, and he pulled them on over his shoes. Even Sherlock accepted a pair, although he looked as though he was in actual pain from having to wear them. 

“Won’t these leave footprints?” John asked.

“We’ve already photographed and sampled. You can go ahead.” Anderson was the picture of politeness until John turned his back. Then he added, an aside to his assistant, “Do you think we’d let _him_ destroy yet another crime scene?”

John wheeled on him. “Sherlock has never destroyed one of your crime scenes. He might look like he doesn’t care, but he is so careful what he touches and how he handles evidence. If you’re mad about the last one, he’d have stuck in one spot if I hadn’t bullied him into the shower. It was a _medical necessity_." 

John paused, took a deep breath, shook his head. “If you’ve ever had trouble figuring something out, that’s on you. Not on him. Now, we’re going to go do our job.”

And so they did. John picked his way through the gore beyond the double doors, a step behind Sherlock, who was walking as if there weren’t blood and bits of flesh everywhere. John noted with interest that shoe covers stick when there is congealing blood on the floor. He had plenty of experience with blood, of course, but this was new. The blood on the floor had always been fresh, when he was stepping in it in field hospitals in Afghanistan.

Sherlock seemed to forget his agitation for a moment as fascination with the scene took over. Hand, arm, shoulder… a backbone made a diagonal in front of an empty stall, a few bits of flesh clinging. A foot in the feed trough, a thigh sticking out of a water bucket. Where was the other… An audible “oh,” from Sherlock. The other arm dangled from the hayloft’s trap door. 

The barn was cold. Floor swept clean here in front, but the back stalls were dusty and cluttered. No animals. John noted with interest that the blood hadn’t made it all the way across the barn. The worst of it stopped about 15 feet from the wall on his left. Rather suddenly, he thought. Curious.

Sherlock was crouching by the severed hand, leaning so low his nose was almost touching it. Then his head snapped up. His hand started tapping against his leg again, the visible tension back in his body. “Lestrade!” he barked.

The DI hurried over. “Ok, tell me. What’ve you got?”

Sherlock spoke so quickly, only his perfect diction saved the words from becoming gibberish. “Squared-off nails,” he began. “Unpolished. Fingers tapered. Almost definitely a woman. The blood, settled into wrinkles criss-crossing the back: older woman. Nails smooth, normal appearance. Reasonably healthy. Probably good lungs, no heart disease.”

He strode over to the feed trough and gestured crisply at the foot lying there. “Toenails neatly clipped. Not yellow or thickened. So: probably not diabetic, either.” He whirled over to the forearm sitting a few feet from the door. “Not particularly interested in fashion. You see the bit of cloth here? Cheap fabric, atrocious color. You have a shirt this shade, don’t you John?” he added without slowing down. “Best get rid of it. Bad associations now, too.

“So. Older woman, getting her barn ready for livestock. Cleaned, organized—but only a small part of it. Hobby farm. Look at the stalls, the height of the doors. Alpacas. I expect you’ll find a spinning wheel in the house, next a stack of those horrible knitting magazines full of patterns that should have died in the 1980s.”

“All right,” said Lestrade. “And what can you tell us about the murderer?”

“There is no murderer,” Sherlock answered impatiently. “At least, not one you can arrest under current British law. What I can tell you is that the same thing that happened here is likely to happen _at your house_ if we do not get there right now and do something about it.”

“Sherlock, I think you’re panicking,” Lestrade began gently. “You’ve been up all night, haven’t—“

“Yes I have and no I am not panicking!” Sherlock’s voice rose several decibels and gave the lie to that statement. “Lestrade,” and the intensity in his voice was almost frightening, “tell me about your closet.”

“Tell you about…”

Sherlock leaned forward, getting into Lestrade’s personal space so that the DI took a step back. “Your closet. There’s more room in it than there should be, isn’t there? Extra space for hangers, room for summer clothes in winter, supplementary space at the back?”

“Shoes,” Lestrade replied quietly. “Too much room for shoes.”

“Come here.” It was a command, and Lestrade seemed to follow automatically as Sherlock pivoted toward the stalls. “You see?”

Lestrade obviously didn’t.

Sherlock said it again. “You _see_.”

But Lestrade didn’t.

Finally Sherlock gave a bark of frustration and, crowding into Lestrade’s space again, all but pushed him out the door, to the right, and around the side of the barn. Compared to the inside, the wall outside was in the wrong place. The outside of the barn was about 15 feet too narrow.

Lestrade came around the corner protesting, “It’s a barn, Sherlock. It’s the wall of a barn. It’s got stones, it’s got wood, it’s exactly what the wall of a barn—" And then he stopped. He looked the wall up and down, side to side, and then his mouth fell open in an echo of Sherlock’s expression when he finally figured something out. Lestrade said, “Oh.”

Then he was off and running for his car, yelling over his shoulder as he went. “What is it? What did this?” He paused at the driver’s side door, leaning over the window as he yelled back to Sherlock. “ _How do we stop it?_ ”

Sherlock looked back at him sadly, just for a moment. “I don’t know yet.”

And then he was sliding into the back seat, calling for John to join them, and Lestrade’s car peeled out of the driveway, leaving the homicide team gaping in its wake.


	9. Chapter 9

Detective Inspector Lestrade’s house was quiet. There were a few scattered oak leaves on the neatly mowed lawn. The cheerful red front door was closed, and all the windows looked snug. 

Lestrade bolted from the car and ran inside. 

Sherlock, for once, was slower to move. His fidgeting had evolved to stillness during the car ride, his lips pressed together, back straight, tapping foot stopped, as though he had decided that fighting time was a waste of energy and events would have to be allowed to unfurl. Now he unfolded his long limbs from the back seat of the car and stood, arms crossed over his chest against the chilly air. His keen grey eyes took in the house, the now-open door, the neat curtains covering the windows upstairs.

And then Lestrade’s shout broke the silence and both John and Sherlock were running for the door.

 

The thing with too many eyes watched from the shadows. The shadows filled what had once been a closet in the Lestrades’ bedroom. Past where the door had been there was now an open meadow ringed with trees. But the blades of grass were too wide and too thick, and the color was grey and brown and _not right_ , and the trees beyond it had leathery leaves and were black and red and orange and twisted in ways that didn’t make _sense_.

John knew the thing with too many eyes was there, had glimpsed it there before the chaos engulfed him, was aware, somehow, that it wasn’t part of the fray. It didn’t matter, though. Something with raw, bare, hinged bones had hold of Lestrade’s 6-year-old daughter Ellie, and something with teeth was hanging on John’s back, and John was wishing he had a weapon more useful than a gun, which would be nothing but dangerous in these close quarters. He heard a scream as something with pincers pulled a mass of blonde hair from Lestrade’s wife’s head.

John and Sherlock had arrived to find Lestrade and his wife backed up against a wall, the grey-haired DI standing protectively in front of the lovely, slender blonde, and shapes emerging from the shadows where the closet had been.

John had looked over at Sherlock, found him standing there calm, composed, utterly unsurprised.

And then Ellie had come running in, darting past Sherlock’s legs, her high-pitched, six-year old voice sounding frightened. “Daddy!”

That’s when the attack had begun. The child’s shout was startling, her movements sudden. The creatures’ movements now were desperate, almost flailing, but they were quick, quicker than John, and ruthless. The first assault had knocked Lestrade into a nightstand, and the DI now lay on the floor beside the bed, blood trickling from his temple, as John and Sherlock did their best to fight the creatures off. Lestrade’s wife was cowering but Ellie was hitting and kicking, even as she cried.

They were losing, they were losing because these things were frenzied, fast, violent, and—it hit John suddenly, even as teeth tore a chunk from the back of his neck—they were _scared_. 

What if he… stopped? If they stopped fighting, would the creatures stop also? Or would that be the end of him and Ellie and Greg and Greg’s wife and Sherlock, too?

Feeling blood dripping down his back, holding the thing with teeth at arm’s length now, John caught Sherlock’s eye. And caught the same understanding. Sherlock shook his head just a bit—“Don’t stop,” his expression said, “it’s too dangerous to take the chance”—and then he did exactly that. 

Sherlock stepped away.

He gave a great shove at the thing that had been on him, first, sending it across the room and into a wall, but as it scrabbled back across the floor he turned his back on it and strode toward the closet. Toward the missing place in the wall beyond which the thing with too many eyes squatted—stood?—sat?—waited in the shadows.

He stopped a few feet away, while Lestrade’s wife screamed again and Ellie sobbed as she tried to push the thing with the hinged bones away from her body. John reached for it, lifting it away from her as it tried to hang on. Past her terrified face, John could see Sherlock standing still.

His thin frame seemed impossibly fragile as he stopped there, just past where the closet door had been. Where it was in fact shimmering now between _there_ and _not there_. 

_Lestrade’s shirt doesn’t fit Sherlock at all,_ John thought in a moment of clarity. _Too broad in the chest, too short in the sleeves. He looks ridiculous._

And then the thing with the bones clamped down on John’s arm, and he fought off the pain to reach for Ellie and swing her behind him. By the time he looked again Sherlock was a step closer to the thing in the shadows. He wasn’t reaching out, wasn’t speaking, just slowly, slowly, getting nearer and nearer.

The thing was small, shorter than John. Sherlock would have towered over it. He sank to his knees, an arm’s length away, and stayed there.

Sherlock looked at the thing. Too many eyes looked back at him. 

Slowly, slowly, Sherlock opened his hands, arms at his sides. The eyes watched him. Then he lowered his head and, still on his knees, he slid a few inches backward. Then a few inches more. The eyes watched, but the creature didn’t move. “John,” Sherlock said quietly, his baritone voice just loud enough to carry over the sound of fighting and Ellie’s sobs. “You can stop now.”

There were claws inches from John’s face. He could see that Lestrade’s wife needed help. Ellie was cowering against his legs. But his thoughts went quiet as he looked at the still figure, all manic energy dissipated, kneeling like a supplicant before a thing that shouldn’t exist. That shouldn’t be there at all.

John stopped.

He let his hands fall to his sides. 

A claw swiped viciously across his face and he tasted iron as blood dripped over his lips.

But that was all. The thing with the claws, the thing with raw, hinged bones, the thing with teeth all whirred down to a stop. The strange forms turned toward Sherlock, no, toward the thing with too many eyes. 

John took a careful step back. Each of the creatures, now covered in John’s and Ellie’s and Lestrade’s wife’s blood, echoed his movement, sliding or crawling or flowing back toward where the closet had been. 

They passed through what had been the closet door, through the space where there should have been a wall behind, and kept going, their movements accelerating as they went.

Sherlock raised his head. Slowly, carefully. Strange eyes, unmoving, watched him. 

Another moment of stillness.

Then the thing with many eyes shuffled forward.

It reached out a limb, a many-jointed, leather-skinned limb, and touched Sherlock’s face.

Sherlock closed his eyes. Under the ill-fitting shirt, his chest rose and fell with a deep, slow breath.

A second limb extended across the space between them and rested on Sherlock’s chest. Still without looking, Sherlock put out a careful hand toward the creature. It moved forward just a little more, until Sherlock’s fingers came to rest below one of its many eyes.

John knelt, himself, and gathered Ellie into his arms as Lestrade’s wife sat nearby, leaning against an armchair, holding her hand to the gash on her cheek. They stayed that way for minutes, watching in silence.

Then John noticed what was changing. “Sherlock.” He spoke quietly, and the tableau didn’t break. “Sherlock, the door. It’s coming back.”

Sherlock didn’t move.

The door, the closet wall, had been shimmering in and out all along, but now they were present more than not. They were becoming increasingly solid, the world beyond disappearing for many seconds before they faded briefly away again. 

Sherlock, on the wrong side, sat completely still. Fascinated. Oblivious.

“Sherlock.”

The wall and door shimmered into being once again, and Sherlock and the thing with many eyes were gone.

John was on his feet, running toward the closet door. “Sherlock!” He reached out to put his hand against the wood and in that moment it began to fade. John reached through, grabbed Sherlock’s shoulder, and hauled him back through the opening just before the door solidified again and stayed that way.

 

Lestrade woke up when it was all over. The closet was back to normal, or almost. Many of the smart clothes were partway off their hangers, as though something had pushed them aside. The designer shoes were in disarray. Three of them were missing. John wondered if the creatures would keep them as souvenirs, or as samples for scientific experiments. He wondered if there were similar meadows, somewhere, strewn with missing body parts and blood from the other crime scenes.

He’d talk it over with Sherlock later.

For now, John led a dazed Lestrade and his family down to the kitchen, where there was bright light and running water and the walls remained reassuringly solid. He brought Lestrade a bag of peas from the freezer to hold against the growing bump on his head. He also averted his eyes when Lestrade tried to put his arm around his wife and was shaken off. Sherlock watched with his usual laser focus. 

To his credit, though, Sherlock held his tongue for the moment. He even helped out, gently cleaning Ellie’s wounds while John tended to the gashes on Lestrade’s wife’s face, neck, and hands. Then Sherlock sat John down in a kitchen chair, made him strip his shirt off, and carefully inspected the bite on the back of his neck. Ellie was cuddled in Lestrade’s lap, eyes wide below snarled blonde curls, but already calm and taking everything in. She’d be following in her father’s footsteps in no time, John thought.

“Showers for everyone, I think,” Sherlock said, leaning wearily on the kitchen counter. “I doubt that any organisms from those creatures will be a danger to humans, our cell structures are too different. But let’s not take chances.”

“They all should go to A&E,” John told him, looking at Lestrade and his family. “Some of those wounds need stitches, and Greg should probably have a CT scan.”

“And what do you suppose we will tell them?” Sherlock arched an eyebrow. 

“He’s right,” Lestrade sighed. “They’ll think we’re all nutters.”

It took a moment, and then Sherlock seemed to give in to an inner struggle. He pulled his phone from a pocket and dialed. “Mycroft?” His mouth pulled down in a grimace of distaste as he said the words, “I’m going to need your help.”


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated with a small edit, a reader pointed out a bit that was confusing :-)

“You’re drunk.”

Sherlock was sprawled on the sofa in 221B, a tumbler of scotch in his hand. He looked up at John, bleary-eyed.

It was two weeks after the last killing, two weeks after the mess at Lestrade’s house. Lestrade and his family were staying at a rented flat; he’d told John that Ellie was fine, just a little scared of going into closets now, and if the DI admitted it he pretty much felt the same way. 

A new charcoal-grey coat hung from the back of the door, the blue scarf retrieved from the evidence room.

“Yes,” Sherlock said, drawing out the word. The tumbler tipped precariously.

John caught it before it spilled on a stack of dog-eared forensics journals. “This is how you’re dealing with this?”

“Yes.” Sherlock took the glass back and raised it in a toast. “To Mycroft. To his team of tame scientists, toiling for crown and country. To watching them shut down the most interesting thing that has happened in London since…” he trailed off. 

John’s eyes narrowed. “I have seen you drunk. I have seen you so drunk you couldn’t stand up. You _never_ lost your train of thought. You could lecture to a room of Cambridge graduates on a fifth of whiskey and 10 milligrams of heroin.”

Sherlock’s gaze snapped back to its usual sharpness. “How do you know about dosages of heroin?”

John took the scotch out of Sherlock’s hand. “Doctor, remember?” He sat down in his armchair, stretched his legs out, and leaned back, arms folded behind his head. “You going to tell me?”

Sherlock didn’t answer.

John closed his eyes, doing his best to fake “relaxed” and “don’t particularly care.” It didn’t always work, but bugging Sherlock for a confession never got him anywhere. “Well, don’t let me interfere with your willingness to destroy the universe.”

“Yoo hoo, boys!” Mrs. Hudson appeared in the doorway. “Could one of you lend a hand? I’ve just had some shopping delivered, and it’s a bit heavy to manage on my own.” 

Sherlock was up in a moment, dashing down the steps—and away from John—to help. 

“Mrs. Hudson is part of the universe,” John called after him.

It was several minutes before Sherlock reappeared in the kitchen doorway. Mrs. Hudson followed behind him, carrying biscuits on a tray. “Now just what part of the universe are you planning to destroy this evening, Sherlock dear?”

 

“Goodness!” Mrs. Hudson peered into John’s closet. Sherlock held her arm to keep her from getting too close. “That’s very impressive, Sherlock. John will have room for so many more jumpers!”

John didn’t think he’d be putting any of his jumpers in that closet. Or his shoes, or his trousers, or— “Dammit, Sherlock, that was my _closet_.”

Sherlock looked abashed for a moment, but only a moment. Then he seemed to forget about how normal humans behave toward one another. “But look, John! London’s been in existence for over 2,000 years and this is the most amazing thing that’s ever happened here. Think how much there is to learn!”

“Do I want to know how you did this?”

Sherlock shrugged. “Mycroft should train his assistants to come up with better passwords. And honestly, once they found out what caused it… What sort of government agent keeps that in a PDF file?”

“So you found out how to do it. And from that, you… what. Deduced that you _should?_ ”

“Come now, John, don’t be like that. You’ll upset Mrs. Hudson.”

“’Don’t be like that,’” John sighed. “I’m not the one who opened a portal to another dimension _in my own house_.”

“But that’s exactly where one should open a portal to another dimension! Mycroft’s lackeys may be fanning out across England right now, but it’s statistically impossible for them ever to find all the weak places.” Sherlock eyes were alight with excitement. “We need to study this, John! Would you prefer we remain ignorant until a hole opens up in the middle of Euston Station and a legion of—“

“All right, stop, all right.”

Mrs. Hudson was peeking into the sides of the closet, looking up at where the ceiling used to be and down at what had been the floor. “Does it go all the way down?”

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Hudson. Your flat isn’t affected. And you see, John—“ He reached past Mrs. Hudson and gently closed the door. “This door is treated with the same substance Mycroft’s team developed to seal off the other portals. As long as the door is shut, nothing will come through. I made sure of that.”

“So… what you’re saying is…” John sighed. He knew when he was beaten. “There are going to be monsters in my closet. And as long as I keep the door closed, they won’t come out.”

“We can get you a nightlight, dear,” Mrs. Hudson offered reassuringly.

“Yes…” said John. “Yes, I think I might like that.”


End file.
